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How poetry can be a shortcut to truths science tries to discover

On the eighth of the 12 days of CultureLab, Niall Firth looks at how science is inspiring poetry, some of it with very strong language

Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Corbis; artist: Robert Indiana

By Niall Firth

For each of the 12 days of Christmas, here’s something to beguile, distract – and leave you with questions for the year ahead

Simon Barraclough dons a bright yellow jacket, orange Ray Bans, and strides to the front of the stage. Rocking on his heels, he says:

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“I pity you your brief lives
over in the squint of an eye.”

Sunspots is Barraclough’s one-hour, one-man show, with video montage, poems, and a spot of trumpet-playing. It has toured the UK since June 2015, with a final show this month.

Based on his book of the same name, Barraclough acts as the sun’s voice but also delivers different angles on what the sun has meant to us throughout history.

His poems are packed with full and half-rhymes, and music. Read them, and they can occasionally feel twee, but live they pack much more of a punch. There’s plenty of humour: some shorter poems are pretty much one-line gags, while some of the longer ones deal in powerful imagery.

Take these final lines from one of the poems:

“For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan.
For she will kill you with the loving of you.
For she can shine.”

Barraclough’s show comes at the end of a year in which I feel that there has been far more poetry about science. Maybe it’s cognitive bias, but then I work at New Scientist and write poetry (I recently had one published about heavy element researcher, Yuri Ognesssian).

It makes sense: neuroscience speaks to the same urgency to know what makes us tick as poetry. And poetry can be a shortcut to the greater truths science strives to answer. It tells us why we care: the “responsibility to awe“, as the poet-astronomer Rebecca Elson put it.

In 2015, Litmus, a magazine for poems about science, tapped into that awe with its“haematological issue”with some stark and elliptical poems. One of the magazine’ editors, Dorothy Lehane, had previously co-edited Sequences and Pathogens, an anthology bringing together poets and scientists. Her own collection about astronomy, Ephemeris, was also published last year. One of my favourites – about supernovae – begins “worrying little striptease/ soliloquise through the night“.

Barraclough himself has taken the connection between science and poetry further with a stint as poet-in-residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey, UK. Out of this came Laboratorio, an interesting but uneven collection of poems, some of them from scientists at Mullard.

One of my favourite science poems of 2015 featured the year’s biggest science story, NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Written by Fatimah Asghar, it was published in Poetry magazine just a few months before the fly-by. Poetry is where T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in 1915.

“Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.
Naw.
I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.
Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system…”